Chapter 67
Valens
Elodie melted against me, and I could feel her relief and joy overflowing in my own chest. I didn’t remember much, but I knew she’d walked directly into the fires of hell to get me back, and my heart was ready to burst with how much I loved this woman.
I released her after a moment, stroking her hair gently. “You came for me.”
“I’ll always come for you. You’re mine.” The little growl she put on that word shouldn’t have been so damn sexy, but fuck me, it was.
She nipped my bottom lip possessively. “But unfortunately, we can’t sit around and make out. Are you okay? I nicked your neck.”
I touched my neck, and my fingertips came away bloody, but there was no pain. “I think it’s healed already.”
She exhaled harshly, raising her eyes to the treetops. She’d been worried sick.
“I’m okay, promise. Other than furious that I let myself walk into a trap.”
“We’ll talk about that later. Right now, we’ve got collars to get off everyone else on that field. Our pack mates are in danger.”
I surged up to my feet, a memory rushing back to me.
“No, not everyone. If we can get back to the general, I’m ninety percent sure he’s the only one with a control device.
Left arm, under his uniform sleeve. He psychically commands the rest of the enforcers, which means once we free him, a good chunk of their forces should walk away. ”
“Fuck yes. But are you sure you’re up to it? Not to mention, I’m not sure I can get the collar off him the way I did with you. If you hadn’t been holding your sword at the same time… I don’t know if either one of the swords would have been strong enough to break the magic solo.”
I reached down, pulling the small silver device from my pocket. It almost looked like a staple remover, but instead, it was a collar remover.
“I can sense wolf magic all over that thing. You made it yourself?” She sounded impressed.
“I did. I had to carve the guardian’s mark into it to make it work. It was in one of the journals.” The journals I’d started reading late into the night, after she and Bence were sound asleep.
She nodded thoughtfully. “So we’ve got to get you close enough to the general to use it, huh?”
“If you can distract him, I think I can get it off him.”
“Let’s end this thing.” She held up a hand for me, and I twined my fingers with hers, kissing her knuckles as we walked back to the battlefield.
When we reached the end of our cover, we paused, both scanning the battle carefully. The general and the king were easy to spot and not that far away. The king seemed to want to be close enough to watch the devastation he was causing, even though he didn’t want to get his own hands dirty.
Their backs were to the forest, less than forty yards away. They had several guards, but they were spread out and all facing the raging battle, not looking behind them, to where we hid in the woods.
“I’ll go first so I can engage him if I need to,” Elodie volunteered. “That way, you can focus just on the device.”
I nodded, liking the plan. “Just remember, he’s never really alone. He can call for help without saying a word. So watch your back.”
“Got it.”
She crouched low and ran, faster than I’d ever seen her move before, and I followed close behind.
As we ran, it finally clicked what she’d said.
It had required both swords. My gaze dropped to the broadsword in her hand that I would have recognized anywhere, because it was a near mirror image of mine, only slightly smaller.
My girl was a guardian. She’d bonded with the sword to save me.
Triumph rose within me like the sun in the east, burning bright and beautiful. I followed her across the field, renewed energy in my steps.
Let’s fucking end this, indeed.
As we approached the general from behind, she swerved right, and I cut left.
She dove forward with a mighty yell, sword raised, intentionally drawing his attention instead of simply cutting him down from behind, as she could’ve.
The general spun toward her, drawing his own sword, the magic imbued in it dancing before my eyes.
He held it in a two-handed grip, making my job harder, even as he shouted for the nearby enforcers serving as guards for him and the king. But Elodie knew what I needed, and my girl always delivered, even under pressure.
She spun out of his reach and danced back in, putting her whole body into a downward slice toward his left arm, and he instinctively snatched it back, switching temporarily to a one-handed grip on his own sword to avoid the blow.
It was the opening I needed.
I grabbed his arm, ignoring his shout of surprise as I wrestled against his attempts to yank it free from my grip and worked his sleeve up at the same time.
There it was. Mind-control device, this one a cuff just above his wrist. Snatching the removal tool from my pocket, I clamped it on, reciting the spell I’d memorized that released the collars.
Elodie disarmed him while I worked—being one-armed and held back was a disadvantage you couldn’t overcome against a swordswoman as talented as Elodie—and turned to charge his guards, giving me the space I needed to finish the spell.
It was nearly done when a pixie flew into the side of my face, nearly making me trip over the last sentence. But I couldn’t do that. We didn’t need a dead general; we needed a sane one who could call off this attack.
I gritted my teeth, shaking my head and swatting the pixie away before I spat the last few words precisely.
The cuff on his arm sprang free, and I immediately grabbed it and chucked it away. The general stared dumbly down at his arm, jaw working uselessly for a few seconds before his shrewd, steely eyes met mine.
“Thank you.”
He turned back to the battlefield, raising both hands almost as if he were praying, letting his eyes fall closed.
But before I could call Elodie away from his guards, the pixie returned, spreading his vile glitter and slashing at me with needle-sharp claws.
I swung and backhanded it, knocking it to the ground. A puff of pink and purple glitter flew into the air.
But as quickly as one fell, another was in its place. And another, and another, until I could barely see for all the pixies swarming me, tearing at my hair and clothes.
I roared, drawing my sword and slashing through the cloud of them. An answering roar met me, but this time, it wasn’t Elodie coming to the rescue.
The general had released his troops from their orders to attack us, and he was going after the pixie king.
I hacked my way free of the pixie storm their king had sicced on me, just in time to see the general grab the pixie king by the throat, and Kane bounded through a group of confused enforcers to stop, snarling in front of us.
“You have enslaved me and mine, you have damaged our honor, and for that, you must die,” the general seethed, squeezing the king’s throat tighter and tighter. The pixie thrashed, and I saw the flash of steel.
The general let out a wordless scream, grabbing the bloody stump of his wrist as the pixie king freed himself and hovered a few feet away. The general’s men swarmed him, hopefully to tend to that arm.
“No! I will not stop until they’re all dead,” he screeched at the general, too furious to be aware of the giant black wolf stalking ever closer, crouched to leap. “I am the last of my line, and the wolves will pay for the destruction of my mighty lineage with rivers of blood—”
His words were cut off as Kane crunched his jaws around his head. Kane landed with a thud, shaking the pixie king’s lifeless body like a rag doll, then spat him out.
He reared back as if he were going to chomp down a second time to make sure the job was done, but I couldn’t let him do that.
“Wait! He has the controller.” I dropped to my knees next to the mangled corpse of the pixie, patting his pockets until I felt a small lump.
The device was tiny, made for pixie fingers, but I could still see the magical sigils that powered it glowing brightly. I read it quickly while Kane and Elodie fought off anyone who tried to get too close.
In the end, the answer was shockingly simple. I stood and crushed the controller under my boot. The sound of metal collars, anklets, and cuffs clicking open echoed across the battlefield, and for the first time, everyone fell completely still.